by Rob Brezsny
Along the sides it said, “Compliments of the Management” and “Begin Your Day Bright and Shining.”
It was a good gift—ordinary yet weird, versatile and anomalous—but I wanted to make it even better. I fetched a pen out of the drawer next to the bed and added to the list of what this magic item could do.
• Polish Funhouse Mirrors
• Wipe Out Poison From Gifts
• Prime Spanking Surfaces
• Mop Up Cruel Food Which Has Been Regurgitated
As I finished the alterations, I felt a twinge of pain, accompanied by a pinch of responsibility. It was time to attend to my head wound. I took four more Advils from my stash on the sink and assembled the supplies Dr. Elfland had given me.
In my small bathroom, there were two mirrors: a wide one over the sink and a skinny, floor-length one on the opposite wall. Since my arrival in San Rafael four days ago, I’d reserved all my self-observations for the latter. If I stood up straight in front of it, the top of its reflecting surface stopped at my eyebrows. In other words, it cut off the part of my body where the stain was.
Now, though, I felt compassion for the cursed blotch. It was in its death throes, after all. I could afford to be an indulgent caretaker. I stared into the mirror over the sink, removed my beret, and peeled away the bandage. Uhhhhgggg-ly. Swollen, red, stitched, Frankensteinian. I used cotton balls to gingerly apply some medicinal cleanser. It hurt, though not as much as I expected.
Then I got the bright idea to leave it naked and exposed. It would benefit from not being covered up with gauze for a while, I reasoned. Let it air out. Besides that, I had an urge to see how Jumbler would react to it. With all the apparently idealized notions he had of me, maybe he needed a dose of funky reality. I think a cowardly part of me was hoping to scare him off, too. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about whether I should act on my erotic curiosity.
My bath was brief and efficient. I didn’t want to risk amping up my sensuality any higher than it already was. When I emerged, fully dressed except for socks, I found him sitting at the round table in the kitchenette. He was making a sign on the back of the motel placemat he’d taken off the desk next to the TV. It looked like it would soon read “The Eater of Cruelty Command Center.”
His waterlogged white clothes were in a pile in the corner. He had donned my only pair of pajamas, which were black flannel, and my only luxurious piece of clothing, an indigo cashmere robe. Without the frame of his boxy unisex white costume, he looked more feline, almost feminine.
Outside, the rain had become a soft roar. I was glad it had waited for us to finish most of our playtime before kicking in. It joined with the hovering steam from the bath to create an almost homey feeling.
“Here’s my equal and opposite gift,” I said matter-of-factly as I set the “Shoe Shiner” down in front of him. He looked at it, gazed up at me briefly, then returned his view to the gift.
“This is a masterpiece,” he exclaimed with a quiet joviality. “Better yet, a spontaneously conceived masterpiece. Living proof that you are vivaciously attuned to the specific truth of the eternal now. Truly, no one deserves to be Queen of The Eater of Cruelty more than you.”
He rose from his chair to face me and pressed his hands together in the gesture of prayer.
“And now,” he said softly, “I request permission to kiss your crucifixion.”
I nodded. He gently clasped my cheeks with his hands, then brought his lips to my forehead, kissing it five times: over my wound, under, to both sides, and then directly upon it. With the last, I erupted in sobs. To be able to share my age-old secret in the midst of its mutation, and to have it greeted with such intelligent tenderness, broke me open. Tears cascaded from my eyes and nose. A strange nectar welled up inside my mouth. My heart became a fountain, and the hot sweetness it gushed forth shot through the rest of my body in a branching slow-motion throb. In my mind’s eye I saw an aerial view of a skyscraper imploding, its rock-hard skeleton and facade crumbling into billions of granules.
All my thoughts absconded, leaving my body free to act from its native wisdom. I leaned myself urgently into Jumbler, then pulled his face to mine and began to drink his mouth. My tongue undulated along the inside of his lips. I soaked in his surprising taste, a delicate honeysuckle. Streams of my tears flowed down into the mix, exciting me to spill even more.
As he responded to my swarming incursion, our bodies converged, our chests and bellies pressing together. Only then did I comprehend that I was embracing a woman. Her breasts billowed firmly against mine through the velvet and cashmere and flannel that separated them. But the extravagant dissonance did not short-circuit my passion; it only unleashed me further. Now, on top of my weeping, a wave of mournful hilarity struck, a rueful bliss that tempted me to howl or sing or make us collapse together on the floor. I resisted all of these. Through my blubbering laughter, I managed to carry on with the leisurely evolution of our grandiose kiss.
“I can guess why you are crying,” Jumbler murmured in a quavering voice as we began to wheel lazily around the room in a demented foxtrot, “but what is so funny?”
“I just discovered a new way to kill the apocalypse,” I said as I caressed her cheek with mine.
“Kiss all the bad guys the way you are kissing me?” she whispered as her open eyes brimmed.
“That’s an idea. But I was actually referring to the fact that I somehow managed to turn a woman into a man for several hours.”
“You did?” she said. She began to sniffle.
“Until a few minutes ago, I must confess,” I babbled as my tears crescendoed again, “I was under a mistaken impression concerning your gender. But don’t worry. It doesn’t change my feelings about you in the least. In fact, I think it makes me feel even crazier.”
Soon we were both embroiled in deep wailing sobs, our chests and throats heaving. I could not believe the volume of water that poured from us, or the soft violence of our convulsions. And yet we were both driven to keep kissing through the rising tumult.
The happy grief that had motivated my initial outbreak was expanding and mutating. No longer was I crying merely because I’d exposed my lonely secret to a smart playmate who had given me tenderness in return, nor because I’d had to make a sudden and shocking realignment of my perceptions about my playmate’s gender. Those tear-jerking themes had become contagious, lighting up other sore points and hot spots within me. Now I was weeping in amazed excitement that this was the first person outside the Pomegranate Grail who had ever been completely real to me. I was weeping with gratitude that I was finally capable of becoming infatuated with an actual flesh-and-blood human. I was weeping in triumph as I ruminated on the increasingly stunning evidence that I’d done the right thing by running away.
And these were just a few of the epiphanies that were rushing forth, demanding to be wept for. I was spooked and curious at how wild my body felt. I was sad and thrilled at how rapidly I was changing. I melted with anguish and fear as I registered how severe a break I was making from my mothers and the Pomegranate Grail. My liaison with Jumbler was a dramatic upping of the ante in this divorce, not only because my mothers had decreed that I was not to seek any erotic connection before I was eighteen, but also because the lover I had chosen was an infidel, an outsider.
I cried, too, because I was feeling again, only more intensely, the poignant paradox Madame Blavatsky had taught me to feel a few hours ago in the Drivetime: gratitude for the inspirational violations my mothers had inflicted on me, for the ways they had forced me to find out my true destiny.
And why was Jumbler crying? I pledged to ask her when the time was right. For now, I could only guess. If she truly believed that in all our lifetimes together she had always loved me more than I loved her, then perhaps she was shaken to her root by how profoundly she had been able to touch me now, and how passionately I threw myself at her mercy. And perhaps she was crying because for the first few hours of our meeting, I didn’t see her clearly eno
ugh to know that she was a woman.
Now and then, at the height of a fresh surge of lamentation, droplets actually launched themselves from our eyes, splashing down through the air into the confluence of moist flesh where we suckled each other. More often, a pearly flow trickled down our cheeks. However the elixir arrived, we welcomed it as a key ingredient in our kiss.
“In the fairy tale of Rapunzel,” I whispered, “her tears have the power to cure the blindness of the prince. Do you have any blind spots that you would like me to cry on?”
We were still whirling dreamily around the room. During one sweep past the front wall, I had flicked the light switch off. Now, as we glided into the kitchenette, I doused the other. The space was lit only by the dim green glow of my alarm clock.
“I am so very close to healing an ancient split in my psyche,” she said.
“Between?”
“Between being holy and having fun. For many lifetimes, I have tried to get them to originate from the same impulse. And now at last they are on the verge.”
“So where should I anoint you with my tears?”
“Your tears need to reach the crucible inside me where I am trying to get my trickiness and my morality to mingle. It is a spot halfway between my heart and my navel.”
“Then you must imbibe.”
She licked the moisture from both my cheeks, then brought her lips just under the tear ducts of first my right and then my left eye, from which a seemingly inexhaustible supply streamed.
“Give me your potion, artful one,” she sighed as she delicately supped. “Impregnate me with the secret of how to heal others with my pleasure.”
I kept my eyes closed as she proceeded, working to visualize what it might mean for her to accomplish the synthesis she’d alluded to. Examples from the preceding hours immediately revealed themselves. The masterful way she had listened to the clerk at the Mexican food market, for instance. In one coordinated act, she had performed a kind service for the older woman and also used the occasion to do a magic trick which, she said, coaxed God to reveal a desired secret. But more than that. The entire series of fun events she had enacted with me was, I had no doubt, a holy ceremony that was as effective in invoking divine allies as any austere religious ritual could ever be. In fact, the more I meditated on it, the more I was sure that Jumbler was already a maestro in blending trickiness and morality.
“And now I will ask you another favor, dear Sin-Eater,” Jumbler said, her lips poised again in front of mine. “As I pour all my sins into my tears, please eat them. Devour my sins, that I may be free of that which hinders my ability to become the most hedonistic servant of humanity possible.”
As I set about my task, I visualized her tears filling up with any toxins she might be harboring in body or psyche. With my psychic eye, I saw oily vapors, wraith-like shapes, leaving their hiding place in her heart as they migrated into the tears that I was now disposing of. What specific bad behavior or negative habits might they correspond to in Jumbler? Excessive mysteriousness, perhaps? A tendency towards confabulation? I could not guess. But that didn’t matter to me.
“If I was truly Robin the Mouth, the Sin-Eater, in a previous incarnation,” I prayed silently, “let me tap into the powers I possessed then. Dear Persephone, help me melt down the torments and blights I’m absorbing, that they may become a source of beautiful raw energy for Jumbler and me.”
As I sipped, Jumbler’s sobs evolved into a half-rapturous, half-anguished moan, even as her tears continued to ripple.
“Do not stop,” she whimpered. “It feels so real.”
At the peak of her intensity, she let loose a breathy grunt and broke away from me.
“Unggggh,” she said. “Got to lie down.” She slumped over to the bed and lay down. “Come here,” she commanded with a weak laugh.
“What happened?” I said, alarmed, as I slipped into position next to her.
“You made me come,” she smiled, “in a manner of speaking.”
“What manner is that?” I asked, confused but enjoying my confusion. My weeping, after a long copious run, was abating.
“You sucked down my sins so hard you brought on my period,” she replied in a quietly maniacal voice.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said, disappointed.
“Do not be sorry in the least,” she said, shaking her head drowsily. “I have never felt so perfect in my entire life.”
“You’re lying,” I cackled. “I hate people who call menstruation a curse, but it’s not as if I ever heard anyone say it feels pleasurable.”
“The onslaught of bleeding is always orgasmic for me.”
Her streams of tears were following a different course now that she was lying on her side facing me.
“I’m flabbergasted,” I said. “Flummoxed and flubadubbed.” Delirium had begun to possess me, too.
“Not that I bleed all that often,” she added with a cracked giggle. “Before tonight, it has been almost eleven months.”
“Should I go out and buy you some pads?” I said, trying to force myself, against every inclination, to be practical. “I don’t have anything here.”
“No. Too late now. Let it flow. I apologize to your pajamas.”
“But why has it been so long?”
Instead of answering, she grasped my head and pressed her whole open mouth around my mouth. It wasn’t a kiss. She didn’t flutter her lips or swirl her tongue. She simply held this pose and slowly breathed into my mouth, like a rescuer doing CPR. On her inhales, she maintained the seal, forcing me to exhale back into her.
To my surprise, I felt no instinct to pull away. As unnatural as it might have seemed to me in a more rational mood, I was enthralled with the searing intimacy of it all. From deep inside her body, warm, moist air wafted deep into my body. But it was more than air. Tasting and touching it now so vividly, its smoky persimmon amber, its maple syrup mingled with seawater, I had no doubt that it was thoroughly infused with her daimon, her life-force, the distilled essence of her most personal genius. And I returned her gift to her, suffused with my own concentrated potion. Now and then, one of us would unfurl a singing moan as we breathed out.
Gradually, I began to notice a fresh marvel. Or maybe it had been unfolding before, and I was just tuning into it. On her exhales, I saw but also felt a subtle ray of light streaming out of her teary eyes and into mine. There was an actual erotic sensation in my pupils, as if her dewy eyelight were a loving caress. As she inhaled, I sensed or maybe fantasized that she was drinking in an analogous beam from my gaze. Dear Goddess, I prayed, I am making love. Without stroking or churning or undulating, without doing anything more than breathing and looking, I was flooding with sexual pleasure. It sprang from my heart and my eyes as much as from my lowest chakra, and rippled out in pulsing spirals to the ends of me.
I swear that the very molecules of my lover’s face began to vibrate and throb, until I imagined I was looking at an electrified cloud in the shape of an ever-shifting mask. The only constant, in her eyes, was a relaxed concentration mingled with mirthful excitement. She betrayed no restlessness, no distraction. There was nothing else we had to do, nowhere else to go, besides this. I felt utterly at home.
Our tears throbbed in celebration, tiny waves pulsing in rhythm to our heartbeats.
The Televisionary Oracle
is brought to you by
the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail
Purveyors of primordial gossip
Lobbyists for the Cackling Vulture Goddess
Sponsors of the Dream of the Month Club
Organizers of Zen Pride Week
Trainers of the sacred janitors of The Eater of Cruelty
The world’s first think tank
for single mothers
and hedonistic midwives
A pack of anonymous celebrities
that conducts secret performances
designed to burn heaven to the ground
A multinational corporate band of guerrilla builders
by erecting a global network of menstrual huts
A media coven
working to prevent the genocide of the imagination
As you glide closer towards invoking the exact intimacy you need, we’d like to offer you a few love spells.
1. While standing in a mud puddle and hugging yourself, dissolve a four-leaf clover on your tongue and visualize yourself riding piggyback on the one you love.
2. Draw a picture of copulating hummingbirds on a dollar bill and then tape it to a road sign on a street with a sexy name.
3. While standing on top of a mobile home wearing all red clothes, hurl a stolen meteorite as far as you can as you shout out the name of your beloved.
4. Using green food dye, write your initials and those of your beloved on a cake, then bury it in the woods along with your favorite book from childhood.
5. Forget all about trying to glom on to your perfect mate and instead make yourself into a perfect mate.
The doctor is sick.
Mommy needs some mothering.
The fire truck is on fire
and the therapist is crazy.
But don’t worry. The Televisionary Oracle is here
to help you use your nightmares
to become rich and famous.
I love to sleep. And when anyone else but me wakes me up for any other reason except for dream recall—especially the night after a show by World Entertainment War—I am very cranky. Several budding relationships of mine have foundered because my lover refused to respect the web of rituals with which I surround my sleep. The UPS delivery person has been trained never to knock at my door before 3 P.M., lest he be greeted by a dragon.
So as I am startled awake in the here and now, the day after last night’s partially brilliant, mostly failed show at the Catalyst, by what sounds like rocks hitting my second-story bedroom window, I am immediately running hot with the adrenaline of anger. The clock reads a few minutes after high noon. Leave me the fuck alone. Go away.